Author: Dan Hill
-
Small vehicles of Tokyo
A slim cataloguing of the rich diversity of small vehicles that help shape street life in the world’s largest city Unusually for me, this is a post with little in the way of context. Rather, it is simple, recorded observation. As part of an endless enquiry into what makes good streets tick, over four short visits…
-
Agencies to work in the gaps, and holding up questions in public: the ArkDes case
Infield by Linda Tegg (2020), growing outside the ArkDes building On the role of design-led agencies that can work as cement between bricks, allowing systemic responses to systemic challenges, and in particular the case of ArkDes within Sweden’s research and innovation landscape In my recent book Designing Missions, I frequently return to the idea that our…
-
Two recent interviews on designing for technology and the city
‘Technology is the answer. But what was the question?’ Cedric Price (1966) A presentation and Q&A for Urban AI, on designing for technology and the city, and a discussion about on tech, cities, public value, capitalism and design practice for Brave UX podcast Not long after I returned to Australia, back in May 2022, I gave a…
-
Towards a blueprint for the suburbs, and the centres
A radio interview on the Australian city, suburbs and centres—as seen in 1970, 2007, and 2021 A quick note to point to a radio discussion with me and Jonathan Green of ABC Radio National’s Blueprint for Living, which was just broadcast this weekend in Australia. We discuss the possibility of the suburbs and centres within Australian…
-
Strategic design for society: Making the Oslo Futures Catalogue
The Oslo Forest creeps back into the city, in Sofie Finnøy Vestøl and Tina Mee Johnsen’s proposal Making the ‘Oslo Futures Catalogue’, on the first ‘Strategic design for society’ course running at Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), 2021 Einar Sneve Martinussen, Ted Matthews, Aleksandra Zamarajeva Fischer and I just wrapped the first version of…
-
Strategic design for Society: the Oslo Futures Catalogue as a garden of ideas
Front cover and intro page to the Oslo Futures Catalogue v1, 2021 The opening text from the ‘Oslo Futures Catalogue’, produced on the first ‘Strategic design for society’ course running at Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), 2021 Einar Sneve Martinussen and I just posted about the Strategic Design for Society course that we’ve been running…
-
Lagom mobility
Co-opting a loose word—the Swedish concept of ‘lagom’—and redeploying it for our streets and neighbourhoods Working on numerous urban mobility-related initiatives here in Sweden, and running design workshops with stakeholders from municipalities, regional and national government, transport agencies, Volvo, MoveByBike, Voi and many others, I started stringing together a phrase, ‘lagom mobilitet’ to describe how…
-
Sharing research about the shared value of shared streets
Quick visualisation of the range of outcomes potentially triggered by retrofitting streets Help build this collection of shared, open research about some of the multiple and diverse forms of value that retrofitting our streets might produce This is something of an experiment. As part of our ongoing work at Vinnova funding and collaborating on new research…
-
Landscaping connectivity
A recent thought on blurring streets and parks in Stockholm echoes an older thought on spatially shaping connectivity and informational intensity on Barangaroo, Sydney In a recent piece on adapting Holger Blom’s landscaping principles from 1940s parks to today’s streets, I suggested we might think about a blurred, shifting continuum of park-like conditions—biodiverse and culturally…
-
Running a ‘find-and-replace’ over the city, replacing streets with parks
A Stockholm street we ‘loosened up’ with the first prototypes of our Streets mission, Autumn 2020 Adapting Holger Blom’s 1946 principles for Stockholm’s park programme to inform today’s street systems In my piece unpacking Brian Eno’s design principles for for our Swedish street mission, I suggested, as an aside, that “it feels like landscape architecture, having been…
City of Sound 